


You're the brightest star in my sky

by Maicaly



Series: Kid Peter Parker and his overstressed dad [8]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, Kid Peter Parker, Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker is Tony Stark's Biological Child, Precious Peter Parker, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark is Good With Kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:59:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27876470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maicaly/pseuds/Maicaly
Summary: There is a before and after in Tony's life, marked by his son's birth; Peter Benjamin Stark, who has the mission of making his dad's heart melt as many times as possible. And Tony doesn't waste a second of his life wondering what the best part of his world is.-The conversation could have stopped right there, but then it wouldn’t be one of Peter’s smart conversations, that make Tony’s chest tingly and his stomach hurt with laugh. Picking a black crayon after not finding the blue one, that is now a few feet away, nearly under the couch, he goes back to his paper. He’s trying to represent JARVIS at his best, so carefully he adds a little more black to the already too back part of the drawing.“And we’re going to marry” Peter finishes, and misses Tony’s mouth opening wide; he’s not even sure Peter knows what marriage is. “Miss May has told us today that she’s gonna marry Mister Ben, the older kid’s teacher. And Ned and I asked her what marry means, and she said that it’s when two people love each other a lot. You marry the person you love the mostest! So I said Ned I’m gonna marry you, daddy. Do I get to wear a pretty dress?"
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: Kid Peter Parker and his overstressed dad [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1912777
Comments: 8
Kudos: 196





	You're the brightest star in my sky

There is an after and before in Tony’s life, separated by a really thin, yet important, line that is Peter’s birth. 

Before Peter, is wild parties that left him naked most of the times, alcohol of every colour and flavour, men and women running in and out his room, mornings of hangover and not getting up until noon, and clothes scattered around his floor. It is about forgetting names and meeting, pretending to care about important people only to laugh at them behind their back. It’s living in the eternal bachelor dream. But it’s also pain, utter and deep loneliness that drags him down until he can’t remember any reason to keep going. It’s drinking to forget, and hope not to wake up in the morning.

Then Mary Fitzgerald appears with a positive pregnancy test, no desire to keep the baby and Tony’s world comes down. It’s tears, ugly sobs in the morning and desperation at night, it’s cursing his father left and right and suing the preservatives’ company. 

Baby Peter comes early and weights 4.8, enough to be alive and develop his lungs poorly.

After Peter, is going to be early after reading three books and singing two lullabies, baby food of every colour and flavour, only trusting his really close circle to enter his house, mornings of getting up before the sun, and toys scattered around the floor. It’s about going to parent-teacher conferences and staying after dropping Peter off in kindergarten to gossip with the families. It’s living what he never knew he needed. There were sleepless nights, many breakdowns and failures, like when he forgot to baby-proof the kitchen and Peter almost got his hand chopped off. But it’s so gratifying, that everytime he looks at him he feels his heart fill with love. 

“Daddy?” a soft, tiny voice wakes him up from his thoughts.

Peter is looking up from his paper, where he’s trying to recreate his family. It includes, apparently, him, Pepper, Happy, Rhodey and JARVIS, although Tony is not sure if that smudge of blue and black is the latest or just a bunch of random colours. From where he’s looking at his own work – or cool stuff, as Peter calls it – Tony smiles to his son. 

“Do you love me?” he blinks at him.

“I don’t know, bub” Tony answers with a smile, used to the endless questions from the four year old. “What do you think? Do I love you?”

“But how much?” 

“Well, that’s a hard question” Tony hums, pretending to think about it; he already knows that he loves Peter more than anything. “I think… I love you as many stars are on the sky”

“How many stars are on the sky?” 

Tony chuckles, because he knows the conversation isn’t ending anytime soon. Instead of letting JARVIS answer for him or telling Peter to shut up, he closes the pen and prepares himself for what he calls ‘Peter awfully smart conversations”. They’re not that witty, and anyone who is present can say that. But to Tony, conversations like that, where his son looks at him as if he has every answer in the world, are what he lives for. 

The kitchen is silent for a second, as Peter stares at Tony. The still there baby face makes him look like a small, cute hamster, and his brown bambi eyes swallow him. He’s too small for his age, so even if he’s a bit old for the booster seat, he still has to use the one for three years old kids. The mop of brown curly hair that Tony has cut a few days ago is grown again, and it makes Peter Stark look even more adorable. 

“Well, there are at least three hundred billion stars out there” he watches as Peter’s eyes grow wide, and he kicks his legs against the counter. “Can you believe it? And I love you even more than that”

“More than that, daddy?!” Peter laughs, knocking without noticing a crayon out of the desk. “Ask me how much I love you! Ask me how much I love you!”

“How much do you love me, Pete?” Tony asks, pretending to be ignorant about the answer. He leans against the table, covering the blueprints he’s working on and probably wrinkling them. 

“I love you three hundre’ billion!”

To prove a point, he stretches his arms so wide that they turn backwards, going as far as opening his palms and pointing out all his fingers. It’s not too wide, considering Peter is barely 38 inches tall, and skinny since birth. Still, it stirs something in Tony that only happens when he looks at Peter and the kid smiles at him, or when the realization of how much Peter adores him comes out; like in this moment. Tony tries to hide the goofy smile, but he makes a terrible job out of it. He’s sure he must look like an idiot, yet if it’s for his son he’s willing to take the chance. 

“That’s a lot” Tony gasps, internally owing at Peter’s slightly mispronunciation. “Are you sure you love me that much? Because that’s a lot. And there’s not taking that back. Not when you’re a moody teenager and don’t want me anymore”

“I’m gonna want you forever, daddy” Peter rolls his eyes. “And you wanna know why I know this?”

“Enlighten me, I beg you”

“Cause you love me three hundre’ billions, and I love you three hundre’ billions” 

The conversations could have stopped right there, but then it wouldn’t be one of Peter’s smart conversations, that make Tony’s chest tingly and his stomach hurt with laugh. Picking a black crayon after not finding the blue one, that is now a few feet away, nearly under the couch, he goes back to his paper. He’s trying to represent JARVIS at his best, so carefully he adds a little more black to the already too back part of the drawing 

“And we’re going to marry” Peter finishes, and misses Tony’s mouth opening wide; he’s not even sure Peter knows what marriage is. “Miss May has told us today that she’s gonna marry Mister Ben, the older kid’s teacher. And Ned and I asked her what marry means, and she said that it’s when two people love each other a lot. You marry the person you love the mostest! So I said Ned I’m gonna marry you, daddy. Do I get to wear a pretty dress?”

“Baby, that’s not –“ Tony cuts himself with a laugh, because the situation is just so Peter that he isn’t even surprised. “Marriage is for a different type of love”

“I know, daddy” Peter does his best to sigh, even if it’s nothing like a ‘tired sigh’, more like a weird soft noise. “Ned said he wanna marry Betty, but Miss May told us that it’s only for grownups. But we’re gonna marry daddy, cause you’re a grownup.”

“It’s not – it still doesn’t work like this. Besides, you’re still a kid, so I guess – “

“I’m gonna wear aunt Pep high shoes, so I’m gonna be really tall” Peter’s eyes shine with a special light when he looks up, far too excited about the proposal. “And you can draw on my face grownup hair, daddy! Like yours! And – and we’ll marry and be the same!”

Tony can barely hold it anymore, so he bursts out in a loud laugh. Peter’s brain seems to work on his own, not really following any logical rules or social constructions. It amazes him to no end how Peter is so clueless to most of the things around him; how he makes his own assumptions of things that Tony has never doubted. As quickly as he can, he controls his laughter and hides his growing grin behind his hand; that doesn’t mean Peter doesn’t catch them, and now he has a frowning kids and a quivering lip. 

In his childhood, there wasn’t much place for stupid or clueless questions. There was no ‘why the sky is blue’ or ‘can I turn into a dog if I bark’. Tony thinks that, if it had occurred to him that marriage was a prove of love, the last person he would have thought about would have been his father. Cold hearted, distant Howard Stark, who didn’t even make it to any of his son’s graduation and didn’t bother with the drawings or questions Tony could have for him.

But he’s already past the point of letting his day getting ruined by the memory of a man that didn’t know how to love him. He has now a child to take care of, who at the thought of marriage being the utter prove of love for a person, has chosen him for the task. 

“Bambino” Tony reaches forward and caress Peter’s cheek, feeling awful for the glassy eyes that stare back at him. “No, don’t cry. Come on, Pete, no”

“I wanna marry you cause I love you the most, daddy” Peter tries to hold back the tears, but he’s doing a poorly job. “Don’t – don’t you love me the most?”

“I love you more than anything and everything, more than the stars” Tony quickly assures him.

“Then why don’t you wanna m-marry me?”

“Because Peter” Tony smiles, brushing off the falling tear. “Marriage is for romantic love, between two people who fall in love because they have lots of things in common and like being with each other” 

“But I wanna be with you! And – and I ‘ave things in common!” Peter whines, messing with the words. 

“It’s like – you love Ned a lot, right? Because he’s your best friend, and you laugh with him and have fun. And he lends you his toys when you play in his house, then he comes here and gives you awesome drawings. Right?” Peter nods against Tony’s hand, still not fully convinced. “But you love me too. And it’s not the same, because I’m your dad and Ned is your best friend. You marry your partner, your boyfriend or girlfriend. So I can’t marry you, but I love you more than you can imagine, baby”

Peter is making grabby hands at him the second he stops talking, and Tony knows fully well that it’s something that Peter needs to learn to stop doing. Pepper, Rhodey and even Peter’s teaching has pointed out that Peter is too dependant on him, and that shouldn’t be cuddled so much because he needs more independence. But what else can Tony do, after being confessed by the boy to be the person he loves the most in the entire world? So Tony gets up and quickly gathers him against his chest, noticing how tiny fingers claw at his shirt. 

He’s embarrassed to say that he’s as dependant of Peter as the kid is of him. He still remembers a rough month when Afghanistan was too present, and the only way of keeping the PTDS nightmares away was to have the familiar weight on his chest as he slept; so he allowed Peter to sleep with him with the excuse of the kid having a hard time, while Peter was just content with going to bed anywhere. 

“I-I’m gonna marry you” Peter stubbornly says against his neck. He hold tighter when Tony tries to look at him in the face, so the man gives up for the moment.

“Okay, kid. Whatever you say” he sighs. 

“Can I wear the dress?” Peter asks again.

“Let’s see. What about if, instead of marrying, we play fairies in your room with the dresses Pepper gave you for your birthday?” at that, two pair of brown wide eyes stare at him, any hint of sadness suddenly gone. “We can play in your room until dinner time, and then we’re gonna make a special fairy dinner. What do you say, buddy? Does it sounds good?”

Peter turns into an hyperactive kid the next second, jumping out of Tony’s arms and nearly hitting his head open with the counter. He doesn’t seem to care as he falls on four and speeds to his room, already screaming that he’s gonna be the purple one and have the crown that Tony made him last month. As Tony walks behind him, telling JARVIS to keep an eye on the human earthquake, he thinks about what Peter has just said. 

Not just the funny part or the sad one. About the fact that he has just said as if it was nothing that Tony is the person he loves the most. It’s as if he doesn’t care about how many times Tony has let him down; like that time he forgot him in kindergarten or that night when he got drunk and Peter woke up in the middle of the night to see his dad passed out in the living room. He had just been a small kid in both occasions, but it still hurt Tony to the core what Peter had to live with.

Considering all of that, Peter thinks his father is not only worthy of his love, but also gives him every inch of trust and adoration he has. 

If anyone asks, he will deny that he actually brushes a tear as he make his way to Peter’s bedroom, where a box full of customs and various stuff has been emptied on the floor. He endures two long hours of being Peter’s fairy friend, wearing a yellow tutu and carrying an sparkly wand around. Tony even lets him scatter glitter across his cheeks and forehead, and paint some weird symbols on his hands. 

It’s all worthy, as long as he sees Peter smile. There is no doubt, indeed, that life after Peter is just what Tony needs to be completely happy.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have any suggestion, you can send them to me in Tumblr - imaginesmai - or leaving it in the comment! Thanks for reading, feedback is always appreciated! Find me in instagram by @irondadiscanon


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